Friday, 11 November 2016

Customer Experience Journey Mapping

Do we understand our customers?

The importance of
understanding what matters to our customers is recognised by most people. Isn’t
it?Well, I thought I was pretty clear
about this until I attended a workshop on Customer Experience Journey Mapping
this week.The session was run by Oracle,
the software computer people. In fairness to them, they didn’t try to sell
anything to me.

I think their pitch was
just to provide insight to me and the other HE sector professionals so we would
think well of them, and I have to say that it worked.And if background reading is your thing – the
materials to support this are available as free downloads from this website: http://designingcx.com/cx-journey-mapping-toolkit

With lots of information on using high tech stuff like
post-its and sharpies!

Customer Experience Journey Mapping, or CXJM for short, is
about using a structured model approach to create a depth of understanding
about the people we provide services to. This is the key to then designing how
our interactions can be made better. And better interactions mean better for
the student, better for the staff and better for the organisation.The key learning points for me included:

Really understand the customer in detail so that I felt like I was helping a person I knew, not just one of any number of faceless customers

Breaking down the experience they had into bite sized junks that gave real insight

Understanding not just the functional needs but also the emotional impact of the experience

Seeing the cross team/department/silo players and their impact

Building this understanding with a diverse group that supported innovation and ownership

Creating a powerful case to take action, not just a list of good ideas’ that gather dust somewhere.

I would like to explore using this with colleagues since I
believe it has the potential to help us improve what we do by understanding,
learning and working together, which is what improvement is really about.Hopefully a future blog will be describing
what we have done and achieved using this approach.